Of Blogs Past Part Six: Hillsborough River Chronicle

UPDATE: It turns out I never felt comfortable with the title Hillsborough River Chronicle, so just before the end of 2016 I changed the title to Balderdash and the Moon. The new title, I think, ties in better with the titles of previous blogs.

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Blogging helps me cope. I don’t know how to respond to our new political reality, so I’ve decided to take up blogging again.

If you read the series Of Blogs Past you may note I have a fondness for obscure terms and neologisms: Intelligencer, Re/Creating, patahistory, abderitic. I decided I wanted a title for this blog that didn’t come with an asterisk and an explanation. I also wanted something rooted in the real, natural world. The inspiration for the title Hillsborough River Chronicle lies with Warren Ellis’s opening to his newsletter which begins with some variation of “Hello from out here on the Thames Delta.” I like that he’s writing from a geographical landmark rather than a city or country. I want this title to serve as a reminder to stay grounded in the natural world as the mediated world churns up humanity’s psychopathologies.

The Hillsborough River Chronicle will cover whatever I want. I live in Tampa, so I’ll be blogging occasionally about local issues. I continue to work on my writing craft, so sometimes I’ll post about stories, rejections, maybe even a story or two. I like to share stuff I find on the Internet, so sometimes I’ll point to those pages. I’ll also be posting about what I’m reading or watching or eating or listening to. Sometimes there will be long silences because I want to prioritize my fiction writing over my blog writing. It will be, in effect, a combination of all the interests of blogs I’ve written over the last decade and a half. I hope that it is part entertainment, part educational, part practical, and heavily spiced with weirdness.

Wipe: A Brief History of Toilet Hygiene

INTRO

“What am I looking for in this passionate searching through articles? I am looking for a viewpoint that will make a different world around me when I look up and out the window, a different universe, the same great change I saw when I first started reading science fiction.” – Katherine MacLean

Kant likened the worst of humanity to the Abderites, hence Abderitic –

“Bustling folly is the character of our species: people hastily set off on the path of the good, but do not persevere steadfastly upon it; indeed, in order to avoid being bound to a single goal, even if only for the sake of variety they reverse the plan of progress, build in order to demolish, and impose upon themselves the hopeless effort of rolling the stone of Sisyphus uphill in order to let it roll back down again.” — Immanuel Kant

*abderitic – believing the world is getting neither worse nor better, while simultaneously believing the world is getting both better and worse.